XVIII. On Trembling

; or, Sitting in Uncertainty

A bad man I knew once is dying, or that’s the hope. How quickly death will come isn’t certain: his mind is going, this much I know, and his body (or so I’ve heard) is shrunken and skeletal and not infrequently shit-smeared. I felt a jolt of pleasure when I heard the news. My joy frightened me, not because I’m immune to ungenerous or even cruel feelings, but because it meant I remained attached to him somehow, or to the remembrance of things he and other men have done to me, that I am still pinned down by certain histories of violence, and am not, as it were, over it. In my pantheon of bad men, he hardly even registers now. I remember so little. A black hole in the center of a room, the stench of cigar smoke, a knowledge of my perilous smallness. In a way it is a blessing to have nearly no memories of childhood, as though I was born at thirteen, damaged and inward, a broken daughter emerging fully-formed from the crown of a long-gone father.

The things that came after I mostly recall. No more blessings.

The story of this man is barely mine to tell, so I mostly haven’t told it, though he cameos briefly in Trauma Plot. I was only brushed by his viciousness, but I grew up in its shadow. What he did to people I love was far worse, and much of my present trouble lies in feeling duty-bound to extend support to them as they shoulder the burden of this man’s life’s conclusion. I would like to be thoughtful in how I communicate with them about him; I would like, without embroiling myself in any of it too deeply, to find some way to be of use to them. I haven’t spoken to this man since my early twenties, when I couldn’t make rent and had to borrow money from him. Money was always the thing he held over people to keep them in line. It’s a sick feeling having to scrape for cash in the first place, but taking his felt far dirtier—knowing I would be in his debt, knowing we would be, again, connected.

they give you free peaches in Philly I guess

That I broke off communication with him shortly after repaying the loan was the right call for me, but it wasn’t right for everyone in my life. It’s not my business keeping anyone else from forgiving him, or reconciling themselves to their own traumas, or even finding compassion for an old man as his body gives out and his time on this earth—however nasty—comes to an end. But I refuse to feel badly for wishing it would come quicker, for wishing we lived in a world where all the bad men didn’t have all the leverage and didn’t seem to live forever, watching with impunity while their crimes kill the rest of us off. The prolongation of this man’s particular dying seems especially needless; just more grief for everyone.

There was a time in my life when I liked to fantasize about the punishments that would—I prayed—be portioned out to the men who had hurt me. Dreams of vengeance and retribution, pitiless horrors thrown back at them, visions of my wondrous and irrevocable vindication. Revenge begets more revenge, of course, and all these dreams ever did in me was fester. Hatred, as I’ve so painstakingly learned, is infectious; is corrosive. It is also exhausting. Fury ravaged my body and alienated me from other, more generative emotions, so I never felt rested or peaceful or clean. And when I saw I could do nothing to those men, that I had no power there, I turned all my bad feeling back on myself. I was perfectly positioned to cause that self harm, hating the pathetic victim I was, hating my weakness, stewing in my shame. It seemed impossible the defilement was something inflicted on me—there must be something within me that had earned it, I thought, something about the child I was, and something, later, about the kind of woman I was, or am. I acted out. I acted a mess, and messiness saw its likeness and came home to roost.

how I feel every day when I wake up

Having written the literal book on it, there are times I trick myself into believing “my” “trauma” no longer has any hold on me. Mostly, I think—or tell myself I think—it doesn’t. Writing (as I have written elsewhere) is in no small part a technique of domination, and in narrating the worst of my life, I gave shape to the vast abyss at my center, which let me make it small, which allowed me to seize some semblance of control for myself. But a book cannot dispel the past. It can’t eradicate experience, either, and there’s something to be said about how I’ve awarded those moments a sort of talismanic permanence; I’ve calcified them forever, those awful events that might have died with me at the moment of my own death. I couldn’t live with them inside me any longer, though, for they were rot: a metaphysical unraveling.

I don’t know why this news has been hitting me so hard, why my past again has such profound immediacy. I’ve hardly written lately, a state of affairs that always sort of wrecks me, leaves me anchorless. Creative silence habitually signals a period of dissociation in me, and it’s true, I feel a bit split these last months. I have a sense at times I don’t know where I’m meant to get to. I’m between book projects; Trauma Plot wasn’t the international success story I suppose I must have dreamed of; I’m beyond burned-out on bartending; I spend most of my days alone. There’s a lot in my life to celebrate, too, and I am trying to cherish those things, to feel gratitude and to stay open and present. It’s not easy for me. I cloister myself when I sense any sort of threat; I shut down, but I’m trying not to journey underground again.

I often think of the instruction—bear with me through the woo-woo of it all—to let go of what no longer serves. I remind myself how carrying my torturous history kept me for many years from the life I dreamed of having, kept me from being in my body, kept me from offering and receiving the sort of love I longed so badly to give and to feel in return. The trauma persists, yes—that grinning golem in my periphery—and I have rough days still, but they’re fewer, and I’m mostly better at managing them. This weekend was a torment. More news about the bad man; more news about a loved one’s illness; more uncertainty about a possible illness of my own, then the fear that I could be heading into another era of endless doctor’s visits, and so soon after finishing a three-year-period of poking and prodding and scrutiny and convalescence. I don’t mean to be vague, but I’m superstitious about such things—I worry I could summon my terror into existence.

Bodies are wily, unpredictable things, and all of them can or will turn against themselves eventually. The thought that I might be facing a civil war, when at last I am at home in this body, froze me in place, it paralyzed me. On Friday, then, I set out to do something I don’t do anymore: get utterly obliterated. I needed, I guess, to be out of my body a while, to poison it into submission. It’s embarrassing to admit this, that I fell back on an old crutch while fleeing the knowledge of my powerlessness, but I won’t fix the thing if I can’t look at it, and anyway the escape hatch didn’t open, and I found I didn’t miss that version of me, even if she was often thrilling, even if people—men, especially—were drawn to her chaos. When I was that girl, I didn’t love myself, I didn’t protect myself, and the bedlam I created was a fashion of proving to the world that I didn’t deserve love or tenderness or protection. That I was precisely the kind of thing those men had made of me. I don’t accept this anymore, I won’t.

somewhere along our drive up the 101 to Portland

I spent much of Saturday crying, both because I was astoundingly hungover (an experience that always puts you quite solidly in a sense of your own body) and because I began to let myself process all the strangeness and doubt that’s been boiling beneath the surface. I saw with greater clarity how scared I’ve been recently—about the world and certain political futures, yes, and also about the rest of it: fears over money and my so-called career, my body, loneliness, terror at the thought of losing people I love, losing the man that I love. I went to a restorative class last night and cried through most of that, too. I used to feel shame over becoming emotional during practice, but eventually I realized strangers don’t pay that much attention to me. We don’t pay that much attention to anyone else. One of the great pleasures of growing older is finding you aren’t at the center of things, and what a relief. Where better to cry than in the anonymity of the subway, where better to give yourself over than when doing hip openers while your face is buried in a musty bolster?

In class, the instructor noticed my weeping, for when he put his hands on me for an assist, my whole body was trembling. I let it. I’m reviewing a book now where the author writes that wild animals (and children) often tremble to relieve stress—that trembling calls them back to the body after a shock—while adult humans suppress or are socialized out of this quite natural response. I remind myself lately to listen to my body, for it understands many things I don’t, or have been compelled to unlearn.

Despite all the circling unknowns, I’m entering a six-month yoga teacher training program in November. It’s a process I’ve longed to undergo for the better part of a decade and have continuously deferred because of financial concern, but it feels like the right time. I can’t keep putting off my life and diving underwater. I can’t keep stifling the trembles. I don’t know if I’ll end up teaching, which is a funny thing to confess in the moment I mention my decision to become certified, but I’m trying to be better at sitting in the discomfort of my uncertainty. Part of me has dreamed of doing trauma-informed body work, perhaps in the hope of helping other people re-situate themselves in bodies that were stolen from them, bodies they feel separated from. That sense of confidence and authority in self-presence is what’s kept me in practice—for a long time, it was only in class that I ever felt I was inside myself, that I was the owner of my body, that I was strong and able (to whatever extent possible) to keep myself safe. I’d like to see if I can give some of that back.